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Penguin Pool Murder

RKO Pictures launched what could have been one of the great detective
series in 1932, when Edna May Oliver starred in The Penguin Pool
Murder. As Stuart Palmer's elderly schoolteacher turned sleuth
Hildegarde Withers, Oliver was one of the screen's most liberated women,
defying Police Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) to track down killers
with little regard for his pride or her own safety. Although Oliver left
the series after only two more installments, leading to a serious decline
in quality for the films, her first two outings in particular were years
ahead of their time, thanks to director George Archainbaud's uniquely visual narrative skills and for the films' depiction of an older, independent woman.

Withers first appeared in the novel The Penguin Pool Murder in 1931,
the latest in a long line of elderly female detectives that dates back to
Miss Amelia Butterworth, a character created by Anna Katherine Greene in
1898. She would be followed by Rachel Innes in Mary Roberts Rinehart's
The Circular Staircase (1908) -- better known by its stage and film
title, The Bat -- and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, who made her
first appearance just a year before Withers. Drawing on his background as
a private detective, Palmer wrote novels and short stories about the
character for more than two decades.

At the time RKO filmed The Penguin Pool Murder, they had the perfect
Hildegarde Withers under contract, character actress Edna May Oliver, who
had won acclaim for her supporting role in the Oscar®-winning Western
Cimarron (1931). As her partner in crime solving they cast another
veteran, James Gleason. Their affectionate sparring was so effective the
studio even had them get married at the end. Director George Archainbaud
kept the action moving briskly, as he would on the Western films and
television series he would specialize in decades later. He also added an
innovation that would remain unnoticed for years; several of the sets had
ceilings prominently featured. In that, he anticipated Orson Welles' work
on Citizen Kane (1941) by almost ten years.

The Penguin Pool Murder did well enough to inspire a second sequel,
Murder on the Blackboard (1934), with the same stars, director and writer
two years later. Deciding that Withers and Piper worked best as friendly
antagonists, studio executives decided to disregard their marriage at the
end of the previous feature. Oliver would star in one more Withers film,
Murder on a Honeymoon (1935), with Gleason but without Archainbaud.
When she left RKO later that year, the studio would try to keep things
going first with Helen Broderick and then Zasu Pitts in the lead. But neither was as
perfectly cast as Oliver, and the series died after only six films. That
hardly marked the end of the road for Withers, however. MGM adapted
Once Upon a Train, co-written by Palmer and Craig Rice to team
Withers with Rice's hard-drinking lawyer detective John Malone, in 1951.
But they transformed the schoolteacher sleuth into a Montana housewife
played by Marjorie Main for Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone. In 1971,
ABC would produce A Very Missing Person, a pilot for a Hildegarde
Withers TV series starring Eve Arden, but decided not to pick up the
project. Five years later, the character would put in her last screen
appearance, in Neil Simon's private eye spoof Murder by
Death (1976). This time she would be played by Estelle Winwood as a decrepit
old woman cared for by Elsa Lanchester in a spoof of Agatha Christie's Miss
Marple. None of these pretenders to the chalkboard could compare to the
original, however. Whenever The Penguin Pool Murder airs on
television, it attracts new members to its devoted cult of fans.